Bio-Politics; Nature vs Globalism, Conservatism and Libertarianism

SAVE AS FAVORITE

VIEW FAVORITES

By Rob Kall (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

For OpEdNews: Rob Kall - Writer

The laws of life are harsh. Fail to respect them and you die. Why should we expect the world of mankind to not be subject to those same laws?

One useful "spinoff" of new sciences and technologies is they provide new metaphors and analogies we can use to conceptualize aspects of our lives and our world.

Some of the most venerable, enduring and credible of such metaphors come from biology.

For example, no life form can exist without a skin. This seems so obvious. Yet an "organism" as complex as a nation-- the level beyond a single organism-- is treated, by simple minded globalists, as though it can survive without a skin, particularly an "econo-legal" skin. This confronts the laws of life.

Skins are membranes. Membranes do not have to be living things. Membranes allow some compounds and components to pass through them and it blocks some. Membranes have a kind of intelligence. It makes sense that healthy, life affirming, growth enhancing policies should be based upon membraneous metaphors and models. I've written about this at greater length, here about four years ago.

Another biological law-- an immutable fact of nature, and really a collection of related laws-- is that biological organisms live in an interconnected, interdependent world. Interdependent. That's a word that conservatives don't like. This collection of laws also requires that biological organisms NOT be left alone. Leave organisms alone and they fail to reproduce and die. Not exactly a concept that fits with libertarian "leave me alone" philosophy.

Then, there are these things in nature called regulatory processes. Oh yes. Life does not persist without very firm, constant regulations. And the more advanced, the higher the life form, the more the regulatory processes. Take warm blooded creatures-- birds and mammals. They require thermal regulation. Take blood chemistry. You don't want that to go off kilter, or you die. The science of biotechnology is, in many ways, the science of exploring and understanding regulatory processes. Even the massive, exciting genome processes, cloning, stem-cells-- all of these involve understanding the regulatory processes. When we learn how the regulatory process by which a stem cell works, we can control it so it does healing things.

When regulatory processes go wrong, or stop operating, things go badly-- illness, cancer, death. Regulations. Conservatives and libertarians profess to not liking them. But really, corporations just don't like certain kinds of regulations. They do like regulations that protect them from litigation, that spell out ways that they are allowed to operate with impunity. They just don't like regulations that restrain them, that hold them back from doing things that they want to do.

Cancer drugs, chemotherap and radiation therapy work that way too. They block tumors from growing without any restraint, without any consideration for the effects they are having upon the body. A world without regulations is, if you believe that the world of living recapitulates the world of life, an impossibility. Regulations are necessary to keep vital balances, to make sure that unhealthy, deadly extremes of growth, of a multiplicity of imbalances do not occur.

Nature allows variations. The diversity of forms of life attest to this. Even within a single species, nature allows flexibility-- and the variety of shapes and sizes and colors and the diversity of characteristics of humans attest to this. Biological regulations allow some range of variation. That's why blood tests show acceptable and unacceptable ranges for cholesterol, sugar, etc.

The idea that a nation, an economy can function without regulations is actually very popular. This is the basic concept of the Milton Friedman, University of Chicago School of Economics. Billions of dollars have been expended based upon this hokum. Millions of lives have had this silly, stupid theory inflicted upon them. Tens of thousand of victims have died because of these crackpot, nature-contradicting ideas.

One libertarian perspective that laws of nature DO support is the right to be left alone. Put too many inhabitants in a small space and they go crazy or get sick. Try to impose the laws of one organism upon a different organism and it can kill it. Just try watering a cactus with the amount of water an Amazon rain forest plant needs.

The laws of nature could be seen as "god-given." It seems to me that bible-toting evangelicals might look to the laws of life as a source of teachings, and that they would reject theories and political approaches that fly in the face and contradict nature's laws.

Another law of life is that in an ecosystem predators and prey must maintain a balance. When a predator ravages a land so that most of the prey are gone, the predators will die off. Or if one bio-element of the ecosystem uses up an extreme amount of resources, the ecosystem will adapt, with parts dying, or with changes in which life forms live, which die and which thrive. Consider the transplantation of the Kudzu plant in the southern US, where forests have been replaced by the invasive vines.

The same is true when you drain resources from a nation. Take enough and pull them out of the country, throw them away on weapons and maintaining troops in a foreign nation and you starve the homeland, you fail to maintain the infrastructure, fail to nurture healthy growth. Things begin to fall apart. Weeds begin to take root where healthy maintenance of lanscaping had been the norm. Rare, exotic but useless flora begin to bloom-- stinkweed, fungi, poison ivy, thorny briars. A metaphor?

1 | 2

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Contact Author

Contact Editor

View Authors' Articles

Book Recommendations for "Biology Conservatism"

Darwinian Conservatism (Societas S.)
by Larry Arnhart

$17.90
Lowest New Price $13.45
Number of pages: 162
Publisher: Imprint Academic

Conservatism: Webster's Timeline History, 462 BC - 2007
by Icon Group International

$28.95

Number of pages: 142
Publisher: Icon Group International